Mayor Peter Buttigieg served in the military. Aside from being the mayor of a miserable hellhole, it’s his only calling card for public office.

And the media will never let you forget it. Now will Buttigieg who breathlessly relates stories of driving around Kabul.

Buttigieg has not claimed to have been involved in direct combat, but he has written at length about the dangers he faced in the unpredictable environs in downtown Kabul, where stops at checkpoints or encounters on the street could turn deadly.

“In a ritual to be repeated dozens of times, I would heave my armored torso into the driver’s seat of a Land Cruiser, chamber a round in my M4, lock the doors and wave a gloved goodbye to the Macedonian gate guard,” Buttigieg wrote. “My vehicle would cross outside the wire and into the boisterous Afghan city, entering a world infinitely more interesting and ordinary and dangerous than our zone behind the blast walls at ISAF headquarters.”

It’s more than many have done. But it’s a whole lot less than the people he’s now sliming, like Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, Maj. Matt Golsteyn, a Green Beret, and Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, whom President Trump released, and whom Buttigieg is now sliming, have done.

“There’s nothing pro-military about overruling our military justice system to prevent it from delivering accountability for war crimes,” Buttigieg tweeted. “The president has again dishonored our armed services.”

Maybe if Buttigieg had gotten outside downtown Kabul and faced real combat, he might have appreciated what those men risked and sacrificed. And the difficult choices they had to make. 

Initially, Golsteyn earned a Silver Star Medal, the nation’s third-highest award for valor for actions he took tracking down a sniper who was targeting his troops and assisted a wounded Afghan soldier while also coordinating multiple airstrikes.

He was awarded the medal in 2011 at Fort Bragg. But it was around that time that he also began the interview process for a job with the CIA. In that interview he admitted to killing a Taliban bombmaker. Army investigators later claimed that he told CIA interviewers he had shot the unarmed man and then he and two other soldiers retrieved the body and destroyed it in a burn pit on base.

But, Golsteyn has denied that account, saying Army investigators took a selection of a lengthy interview and misconstrued what was said to fit a narrative bent on charging him.

Golsteyn previously told Army Times that he killed a bombmaker in an ambush but that it was a lawful action. The alleged bombmaker had been detained and turned over to Afghan authorities but was soon released. He then discovered the identity of a local man who had informed coalition members about the bombmaker’s activities and feared for his life, Golsteyn said.

Buttigieg hasn’t faced those choices, but he’s happy to exploit the lives and deaths of those who have to advance his tawdry political career and social climbing ambitions anyway.

But that’s a good summary of his entire career.